"sleigh bells ring, are ya listening'?"

            I woke up restless way before dawn on Christmas morning, and decided to drive to Cattail Marsh, in case there was a spectacular sunrise. 

Of course, as soon as I stepped outside, I knew the odds were against me, because spectacular sunrises and foggy mornings don't tend to mix. But ya never know, right? 

It was in fact, a very foggy morning, and if the sun ever came up, I never saw it. And most of the birds were not near the boardwalk. As it turned out, that may have been because something (a hawk, or other predatory bird..) had caught, dismembered, and eaten an egret right there on the boardwalk. 

I'll spare you the details, but Nature is cruel and unapologetic, if you hadn't noticed.. The notion that it was an escaped hunting falcon with a little bell on its talons crosses my mind... (that's not sleigh bells!!)

There were however, thousands of whistling wood ducks in the reservoir. They were chirping / whistling to each other like frogs on a rainy night. 

At first it sounded almost like ocean waves, rising and falling across the marsh. Judging from the amount of noise the ducks that I *could* see were making and extrapolating from that, there must have been thousands and thousands just out of sight in the fog. 

Each time duck hunters in the distant fields would fire, a wave of silence would roll across the marsh, followed by a wave of whistling as each duck exclaimed to its neighbor "Whoa! Did you hear that?"

Taken on: December 25, 2018

Tags:

Cattail Marsh

fog

ibis

egret « less

Sets appears in: • Cattail Marsh, Beaumont, Texas

Groups appears in: • A picture and a story • flickr (unofficial)

Camera: Canon PowerShot S3 IS, f/3.5, 1/100 sec, 69.9mm, ISO 800 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot S3 IS
Lens:	6.0-72.0mm
Aperture:	f/3.5
Exposure Time:	0.01 sec (1/100)
Focal Length:	69.9mm
ISO:	800
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Photos 4.0
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